Endoscopes are known that employ semiconductor light sources for illuminating the interior of hollow organs and/or cavities within the human body. For example, such endoscopes may be employed to examine the interior of a small intestine in an enteroscopy procedure, a large intestine in a colonoscopy procedure, an upper respiratory tract in a rhinoscopy procedure, a lower respiratory tract in a bronchoscopy procedure, etc. A conventional endoscope apparatus can include two separate fiber bundles, and two semiconductor light sources such as light-emitting diodes (LEDs) coupled, at a proximal end of the endoscope apparatus, to the two separate fiber bundles, respectively, thereby providing two separate illuminations at a distal end of the endoscope apparatus for illuminating the interior of a small intestine, a large intestine, an upper respiratory tract, a lower respiratory tract, etc., during the performance of a respective medical examination procedure.
The conventional endoscope apparatus discussed above can have drawbacks, however, in that the two separate illuminations provided at the distal end of the endoscope apparatus can cause uneven lighting and/or unintended coloring of tissue and/or other matter under examination by the endoscope apparatus, due to the two LEDs providing the respective illuminations possibly being not well-matched in power output and/or color output. To provide for a more even lighting while avoiding unintended coloring of such tissue and/or other matter under examination by the endoscope apparatus, some processes of manufacturing endoscopes have included additional testing of LEDs to assure that the LEDs selected for use in each endoscope apparatus are well-matched in power output and/or color output over specified ranges of operation. However, such additional testing of LEDs during the endoscope manufacturing process can undesirably increase the final cost of the endoscopes.
It would therefore be desirable to have semiconductor-based light source devices for endoscopes that avoid at least some of the drawbacks found in conventional endoscope apparatuses, such as those discussed above.